Single-Card Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
We commonly point and laugh at Skyrim due to its light graphics load, which you wouldn’t think would make it a very meaningful GPU benchmark. But look—there’s plenty of performance difference between a GeForce GTX 780 and 680 (36%).
All of these cards maintain at least 50 FPS through our test run at 2560x1440. And yet, the game still scales really well.
On average, all seven graphics configurations we’re testing maintain sub-1 ms frame time variance. This means the action you see on-screen is smooth and consistent. Worst-case, though, the Radeon HD 7990 approaches 10 ms between frames, while the Radeon HD 7970 achieves an amazing .6 ms. All of Nvidia’s cards show up in between.